Posted
by
timothy
on Wednesday November 13, 2002 @07:13PM
from the permission-based-marketing dept.

Torgo's Pizza writes "The FCC just granted final approval for Comcast to complete its $30.5 billion purchase of AT&T Broadband. Despite consumer worries of increased rates and clear domination of the market, Chairman Michael Powell stated, "The benefits of this transaction are considerable, the potential harms negligible.""

What's the deal? They won't let a good merger through (the sat tv companies) but they'll let this happen? For the people, by the people?? What a load of crap.

I think the laws need to be changes so that when two companies want to merge, or a large company wants to buy another large company, it has to come to a vote by the people. We all know how much fun national elections are and that would be the only way to really do what the people want. Obviously right now money talks and whoever is willing or able to pay off a few key officials (or maybe a lot of key officials), can merge to their hearts content... consumers be damned.

Only if you aren't a consumer about to get arse raped by this government aproved monopoly. I'm willing to bet that if the next president is a republican that this megacorp will get to be as bad or worse than Ma Bell, the ultimate in "please sir may I have another" customer relations.

Only if you aren't a consumer about to get arse raped by this government aproved monopoly. I'm willing to bet that if the next president is a republican that this megacorp will get to be as bad or worse than Ma Bell, the ultimate in "please sir may I have another" customer relations.
The number of markets where Comcast and AT&T compete is not very large, if any all. That means they already have monopolies over their respective areas. All that is happening is that two nearly bankrupt monopolies are merging into one nearly bankrupt monopolies. The only hope is that together they are mostly solvent, which isnt written in stone by any means.

And about your lame attempt at making this a partisian issue, the 90's was the greatest single period of corporate consolidation since the Industrial Revolution.

"Only if you aren't a consumer about to get arse raped by this government aproved monopoly. I'm willing to bet that if the next president is a republican that this megacorp will get to be as bad or worse than Ma Bell, the ultimate in "please sir may I have another" customer relations."

Ya know, right up until the point were people wanted to do slightly more that just voice with their phones, old Ma Bell did pretty damn well. Everyone (and that is key) had reliable, affordable voice service.

Eventually it became a hindrance to market forces, so we altered the system slightly in the so-called "break-up", but the monopoly served to establish a strong infrastructure.

Right now, I'd kill for broadband if I thought it would help. Nope. No can do. I don't add up on some vestige of the monopolies spreadsheets.

Frankly, at this point, I'm all done being patient. I want an adult in charge, put the fist down and say, "universal broadband access, no excuses." If welding together enough of these separate bean-counter telecoms creates the opportunity at the national level for this to occur, I'm all for it.

What I don't like is that we were making fair progress through deregulation. It would have taken only a little more access by third parties to the "last mile" infrastructure to get it effectively done. Now, we change administrations and go 180 degrees the other way.

...it's the money. It isn't that they don't want you using VPNs on their service, they don't want you using them on their home service. If you get the service that costs twice as much, you are free to use VPNs. In fact they list it as a feature!

Comcast has this f*cking webpage without an useful abuse report address/form. They do not have postmaster@ or webmaster@ addresses. Obviously they aren't able to administer such services well:-/
And now they get another large chunk of the internet.. that's bad news, even for us guys overseas

Oh yeah, of course the potential downsides are negligible if you can afford to pay $100 for $hitty service. I'm having a hard time paying the 46 those bums are charging now. I mean honestly, is there any end to their greed. How many of you think Powell got a promise of free service AFTER the price jumps to 200 for a line?

The other problem with my service, is that I never know what speeds I DO get. Sometimes it'll feel like 3mgdown/256k up...other times it acts lke 56k. And this is independent of how long/what os my machine has been running. Nor is this affected by who else is using the line and how much of hte bandwidth. Oh, and one other thing, it's got a habbit of going down randomly. It just disconnects and then comes back up.

you should frequently do speed checks at dslreports.com or other places. they store your results so you can see how your bandwidth goes over time. my comcast connection has dropped from well over 2Mb to about 500kb in 2 years. Time for the ole "Finger of God" skript. This pipe is....

Since when has AT&T been in the business of sifting through academic works and general media to discover and reasonably document the current usage and connotations of important words? m-w.com is offered by, guess who, Merriam-Webster, which has been making dictionaries for several decades at least. Last I checked, AT&T's business plan was to provide common carriers to the teaming masses or individual corporations, not to offer content. This isn't AOL/Time-Warner we're talking about. The parent post is nothing more than unsupported FUD.

Comcast is buying the service away from AT&T, so AT&T's business plan and history running common-carrier networks are irrelevant. As far as I can tell, Comcast is doesn't get it. But there's some hope, because (last I heard) some of the AT&T execs will be moving to Comcast as well.

why are you glad you got DSL? 768k/128k service for the same cost as 1.5/256k

Are you saying all DSL is 768/128? If you think that, you are horribly mistaken. Not everyone has such shitty DSL in their area.

My DSL provider gives me 1.5/256, for $49 per month. I also get a static IP, DNS services, several e-mail boxes, and almost never do I get downtime. Not only that, I don't even have to use PPPOE.

DirectTV DSL truely IS a very good provider. When I first started out with them over a year ago they had a few minor issues but it's all blue skies now.

In fact, the ONLY people in my area who WILL touch cable are those who for whatever reason can't get DSL. The cable provider in our area (Charter) blows goat cheese. Frequent downtimes, lag for no good reason, crappy agreements, no static IP, not allowed to run any servers, etc. etc.

I think the reasons for using DSL are pretty obvious. There is no argument here.

Did not the FCC block the merger of DirecTV and Dish Network? Or was that some other government organization?

27 million Comcast/AT&T subscribers still leaves almost 50 million households getting their cable from elsewhere.

If DirecTV and Dish Network merged, the new company would have over 80% of the US DBS marketmore than enough to claim monopoly status. Satellite TV may not matter to you if you live in a city, but for folks in rural areas, DBS is the only way to receive "cable" channels.

Even for those of us where cable is available Satalite is the only way to go, since cable company service tends to be, at best, unresponsive. I know plenty of people who have decided to pay extra to DircTV for local channels just so they wouldn't have to deal with AT&T "customer service" anymore.

First of all, I was talking about TV, not broadband, since that's what the article is about.

Second, I got broadband for the same reasons you did, and I specifically chose DSL over Cable because of ATT's reputation (well earned, in my experience) for shitty customer service. My own personal experience with ATT has been so bad that if DSL were not available to me I still would not have gotten a Cable modem. I might have gotten ISDN, or I may have gone with Satalite if I could stomach the latency. More likely I would just annoyed my wife into letting me go to more LAN parties.

Because Rupurt Murdoch promised Televangilists more time on his cable networks if they would stir up opposition to the satilite merger. Saw it in the Wall Street Journal, dead tree version. Link [guardian.co.uk] has the results, both of the little fishies will be eaten and shut down. So, for a temporary advantage, those fools enlarged the power of their enemies.

The truth only happens in a place where there are many publishers of equal weight. A place with one or two heavies is likely to have "news" that's more entertianment, spin and propaganda than information. An old Russian poverb, "There's no truth in the news and no news in the truth," was made fact by the Soviet Union which had only two news services in any media, Tass and Isvestia, meaning Truth and News (order may be incorrect). Both printed up the same nonsense. It can happen elswhere with far less repressive measures.

because AT&T and Comcast don't directly compete - they service disjoint geographical areas (very very few parts of the US have competing cable systems)

E* and DTV on the other hand do compete directly both with each other and with local cable systems - their merger would have dropped the number of suppliers from 3 to 2 in most areas, and 2 to 1 in a lot of rural ones. Commcast/AT&T doesn't change this

Having said this I think a bigger Commcast is both good/bad - it creates someone to go up against AOL/TW - on the other hand it's just another media giant - us real people are pretty much forgotten in all this - except.... when companies like this merge/get sold - we do too, litterally - there's usually a $/subscriber amount set as part of the deal.

So - in the long run it's better to have two hungry satellite companies keeping the local cable giant honest

Comcast is paying way too much, sounds familiar? We all know what happened to the dot coms, don't we? But CEOs can fix anything by "cost control" (read "laying off enough people"). Then they increase your dues, since they are now a monopoly. Then 5 year later, they go bankrupt because after all 30 billion was too much and because high speed wireless beat them to a pulp. But by this time the CEOs are gone and are laughing from their golden parachutes. Anyway, by this time, no one remembers that it was done on Bush's guard. This is called win-win for the CEOs and the politicians.

I don't understand. Didn't most of that sort of stuff generally happen under Clinton's guard? Wasn't it his administration that would give out donations to corporations that were having trouble as long as it was "important to the economy"?

Chairman Michael Powell says: The benefits of this transaction are considerable, the potential harms negligible.

What he's really saying:
The benefits to Comcast are considerable, the potential harms to the users are not a consideration because their political donations aren't as large as Comcast's, now are they.

First, you're right in that it came into effect on 11/06/02. So any contributions made before then to influence the decision would not have been covered.

And, considering the large number of endruns around the CFA have already been reported on, I'm quite sure that no politician needs limit him/herself to being bought for only $5K.

Plus, you're missing the real point. Powell isn't an elected official. He is a Republican party member however, who has continued to reward through action and/or inaction large contributors to the party. I'm not suggesting personal greed. I'm stating political loyalty/ethical vacuum.

It might not even be that - but if you think about it the people that are making these decisions see 100 or 200 dollars a month as negligible.

How easy, for example, is it for someone like GW Bush to understand the plight of someone making minimum wage? Hes never been there, his parents have never been there, nor his grandparents.

The monetary frame of reference of our politicians is so skewed that a doubling of rates really IS no big deal to them. But they do understand the plight of corporate heads, as that is where they come from and where they will go after government. So OF COURSE they are going to be rabidly pro corporate, even without all the legalized bribery.

w/the bottom up provisioning that is already in place w/ATTBI, I doubt that there will be much of a problem moving over to Comcast (as long as Comcast keeps the provisioning model the same, which I can't see why they wouldn't).

From @Home -> ATTBI they tried to manually put everyone into the provisioning database, but couldn't w/anyone that had a proprietary modem (Motorola Cybersurfer Wave, COM21 proprietary, some LANCity's).

So when AT&T RoadRunner when to ATTBI all the users had to do was call and get the instructions, some of them actually recieved instructions in the mail (that most people here would have no problems following).

there is a web page called the SAS registration page. You goto that site (w/a proxy set temporarily) and the site grabs your MAC address from the modem and allows you access to the new network.

PRAY that Comcast keeps this. The changeover will be mostly painless.

Comcast was telling the CSRs that they would have more concentration on GOOD customer service and less problems... They WANT to keep customers, not ignore them till they leave.

Yes, they can. I know, because they did. When Comcast switched from @Home to Comcast.net, there were all kinds of troubles. They were still signing up new customers and then telling them that they wouldn't have email for at least three months when they expected to have the mail servers and accounts set up. I sat back and snickered from behind my DSL modem.:)

Even now comcast cable is more expensive than DSL in my area - plus they forbid using VPN over the 'residential' package. If you want to work from home you basically have to spring for the $100/month business package. I wish the Bell Atlantic would get thier act together with DSL rollout.

They block IP protocols 51 and 52: no more IPSEC for you! Which will most assuradly fuck up IPV6 roll out as IPSEC V4 is a testing protocol intended for widespread use in IPV6. This (along with multiple key exchange protocols) is why transport IPSEC hasn't become ubiquitous like it ought to have. If we (the inet community) had just focused on IPSEC instead of SSL, SSH, Kerberized Telnet, etc, we would have one point to point over the wire encryption standard for all TCP/UDP communication. Telnet, ftp, finger, gopher, web, you name it would be encrypted by default whenever key exchange could take place. Instead we have a mess of encryption standards and ISPs who block the very protocol intended to secure general net communication. Not that money and profits might fuck up the net at the protocol level, right? That would never happen! *cough!* --M

They allow 2 monoplies to merge, even though ti violates the laws (30%), it brings no customer relief or competition. Yet, they stop the merger of dish and hughes, and echo offered to sell off part their equipment, and spots to allow for another company. Guess which the FCC allows?Like the bush league, it follows the money.

You're forgetting the other half of the cable biz, which is selling advertising, and bundling and packaging channels. Cable companies are ultimately the brokers between advertisers and viewers. So they have a powerful affect on advertising markets. Plus, how cable channels are packaged, and their content, is also controlled by cable companies. If you're HBO and you only have to satisfy one buyer instead of two, that buyer can pretty much dictate what he wants. Even if it's five buyers instead of six, putting so much influence in the hands of so few is not healthy. Think about all this next time your "national network" station is replaced by infomercials on a Sunday afternoon.

This is only for the purchase of AT&T Broadband. This includes AT&T Cable, related infrastructure, and associated connectivity-via-cable (cable modem) customers. This has nothing to do with local phone, long distance, leased lines, web hosting, solutions, etc.

oh please, if you know anything about AT&T's business practices, then you know they've already lifted up the lid.. they don't have THAT far to go..

its bad enough that AT&T's entire range of products are commodity items, but c. michael armstrong proceeded to sell off all the parts that could ever make him a profit. he won't be happy until the only thing AT&T has left is consumer long distance. all that "new fangled" technology is just too much for him.

Is the working theory (excuse, apology, whatever) that if the service provider is allowed to become big enough it can improve service through economies of scale and having enough capital to handle build-out?

My visions of the results of telecommunication deregulation remain visions. At every step where small providers have made progress, obstacles are created by the legacy monopolies. Progress toward telecom dereg was made under Clinton, and it is being quickly reversed under Bush. I'd like to know how they justify it.

Frankly, I don't care how it gets done. I want cheap, reliable, wide bandwidth. Whether it gets to me via Joe's KickAss Wires Inc. or COMCASTATTMEGOPOLY doesn't mean a lot, except that in the former case there would be a lot fewer bean counters micro managing my usage, for a time. Eventually it'll all end up in the hands of a small number of large companies anyhow; economies of scale for a commodity product.

Perhaps I'm too young to remember exactly or how accurate this is, but I think back in the 80's everyone had to RENT telephones from AT&T (or bellsouth?). Don't know how much they charged, but considering I can pick one up today for $10, rental seems a PITA

It happened, but I think it was before the eighties, I remember buying them in the early eighties. Rental was a PITA, because it was really expensive. This was one of the ways AT&T collected their monopoly rents. Where do you think all the money came from to throw at things like Bell Labs, its obvious that Lucent never made any money once the monopoly teat was taken away. Western Electric was the AT&T company that made the phones you had to rent. I believe that you were allowed to own a phone, but it wasn't allowed ot interfere with the network, and ma' bell was pretty slow to approve any phones that wouldn't interfere with the network. They did similar things to the long distance companies, preventing them from accessing their local networks without costly equipment, but that is what brought about the lawsuit that ended with the breakup agreement. Of course those were the days, when long distance calls were more of a luxury. Its ironic that AT&T more or less got to decide how to split up the company, but still gave away all the powerful parts of the monopoly. They kept the then profitable long distance business, Bell Labs, and NCR. Only after it became appearant that the local loops were where the monopoly power was, did AT&T start buying cable companies for rich valuations, hoping to create a local network to compete with the companies they gave away in the settlement.

Yeah, mod me down, whatever. Michael Powell is a fucking housenigger if ever I've seen one. Show me one instance where he's stood up for the "little guy" and not sold us out to Big Business.

Sorry to use such harsh language.

In case you're wondering, a house nigger is a slave that got to live in the big house with the master, rathen than in the grubby slave quarters. He had a better life because of this but was thoroughly despised by the other slaves.

Come to think of it, my explanation is probably more offensive than my use of the "n-word." If you're modding me down because you're a historian, then that's okay.

I've never understood this whole thing about media monopolies... It's not like I ever had a choice about which cable company to use when I moved into my new apartment. Many cities/counties break up the area and give the pieces to specific providers. Thus, I wanted Millennium cable since their internet access is pretty decent speed-wise, etc. However, I live on 13th Ave. and their area only goes to 12th Ave (literally!), so I had to go with ATT. And since I don't trust them (and I need someone friendly to my running a mail server, etc) I went with DSL.

Anyway, so what's up with this? It's like when AT&T got chopped up, but all that did was create a bunch of little baby monopolies that didn't compete with each other, or anyone else.

They blocked the satalite mergers, because they would not have any competitors in most rural areas. Going from two competitors to one, usualy has pretty drastic effects on the competitive landscape. While those in the cities could switch to cable if the combined company raised prices, many rural dwellers could not. The cable companies are usually monopolies because they have a local right granted by a city to be the only cable company. These were designed to get the cable built, otherwise very densly populated areas, several hundered homes per mile, would have many cable companies serving them and everyone else would have none.
Because the cable companies don't really compete with each other exept in population dense areas, where the sat, companies also both compete, this was viewed as adding little to the compined company's market power. A city that was served by one of the companies will still be served by one of the companies. The cable companies are also currently classified as competitors to the local phone monopolies, when you add all these competitors together, the FCC decided that this would not reduce competition much.
Finally, the abrasivness of the EchoStar CEO probably did more than anything else to turn regulators off towards the merger. He is pretty brash, and well you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

What is not being advertised is that those people who are current local phone (over digital cable) customers of AT&T broadband (Comcast does not do phone over cable) are going to be quietly ignored. Comcast does NOT want to support local phone service; local phone service will cease to be advertised, sold, pushed, etc.; they're hoping for slow attrition of existing customers once the merger is done.

As for moving the high speed users between networks - it shouldn't be as much as a clusterfuck as the @Home move was; they have all of the data this time and they control the networks.

One other clarifications:
Michael Armstrong is moving to Comcast. Plus Armstrong is looking a little better (not much, but a little) now that it's been revealed that QWest and WorldCom were fudging their numbers in a big way, while AT&T didn't play that game. (Interesting muse: what would have happened to AT&T if the other companies had not, well, lied? Wall Street forced AT&T's stock price into the toilet because they were comparing the T to companies that were pulling numbers out of their ass)

Allowing Comcast to buy AT&T Broadband is not a major crime. This is just replacing one bad monopolist with another -- the two firms weren't explicitly competing against each other so there is no serious concern that the merger will lead to higher prices, lower quality. Ask yourselves: what was preventing AT&T or Comcast from unilaterally offering more expensive, crummy service? It sure wasn't the "threat" of competition from each other. If anything, it was the threat that consumers would get fed up and revolt or the government would actually be forced to respond to consumer outrage. A merger doesn't affect either constraints - if anything, the merger makes the joint firm more vulnerable to such outrage and government scrutiny.

The real crime is the fact that we tolerate and allow these regional monopolies to prosper under government protection.

The worst thing about this merger from the point of view of an AT&T cablemodem user that I've heard about is NO Usenet. Comcast doesn't support it and AT&T has made some gurglings about following their lead (no loss to the customers because of the wonderful comcast community we'll get in its place).
Urgh.

The only people who should be very concerned about this merger are people who _sell_ to cable operators (i.e. programmers like HBO or equipment vendors like C-Cor, SA, Motorola, etc.).

For end customers, it won't make a damn bit of difference. AFAIK, not a single market in the US are served by both of these providers, so no consumer will see a reduction in the service offerings provided to them.

For folks who complain about only having one cable operator, it's not a regulatory issue. Every local franchise agreement (contract between the cable company and your city or town that says the cable company gets to string wires and provide service, and in exchange the city government gets a % of the revenue plus free cable service for city offices and schools) signed in the last 15 years is non-exclusive, so another cable operator is welcome to come in and set up shop. Problem is, with a few exceptions (quite dense, wealthy neighborhoods), the economics just don't justify building a second network. It's not some global conspiracy, just the fact that you can pay for building a network to pass 100 houses if you get 65 of them as customers, but not if you only get 37 of them.

Dude, what the *&^% is up with all of these mergers?! What ever happened to those precious anti-trust laws? I swear, by this time next year we all going to be paying some sort of bill to Microsoft Comcast Broadband (an SBC AOL Time Warner Company).

Back in January 2002, Slashdot had a major font page story about
Comcast attempting to block customer using NAT [slashdot.org]. Now that ATTBI is going to become Comcast, how long will I be able to keep my home network? Does anyone know if Comcast has been successful in this effort?

What are they doing that's proprietary? I don't know how Comcast works, but ATTBI uses a cable modem with an ethernet out port on it. It doesn't care what kind of computer is talking to it as long as it does TCP/IP.

I would understand if they were using a USB device or something, but I'm puzzled as to how it'd be incompatible with Linux. Could you please clarify?

*Note: I'm not challenging your information, I'm genuinely curious because I may end up being a Comcast customer as a result of this merger.*

My DSL is a real bitch to setup under Linux. I have Earthlink service and it works pretty good now that I have a router that stores my login info and handles the connection for me. I have all of my computers running through that and it all works just fine. Prior to purchasing that routere, I had a hard time getting it to connect using WinPoet which is what Earthlink told me I needed to use. They also said that they would not/could not support Linux. They also are not very happy that I have a router since I don't pay for their "home networking" option but so far they have let me slide on that one.

I have wanted to switch to AT&T cable modem for quite some time now because my DSL likes to die on me when I'm in the middle of important work but I'm stuck in a service agreement for another 6 months so that can't happen. I'm wondering how the prices will change once the merger/acquistion is finalized. Maybe this won't be such a bad thing (I think it will, but maybe we'll get lucky)

Maybe once they have merged, they can eliminate a lot of duplications and dramatically cut costs, passing the savings on to the customers... oh, damn, did I just say that? Ha! I need to lay off the crack.

Most likely they will lay off a lot of their employees, cut costs dramatically and pocket the resulting increase in profits while claiming higher operating costs and jacking up the prices.

I also have ATTBI. It was a pain in the arse to get set up with Linux, because its $#@%$#@ registration system assumes you use Internet Explorer. After the cable modem is registered, though, it works flawlessly.

I used their sas.r1 server, setting that as my proxy. After putting in my acc#, it always came back saying "the registration server is temporarily busy. Please try again later." I finally had to bring out my dad's Win95 laptop to get it registered. Simply ridiculous!

Crap, if there was another option besides sas, I wish my techies knew about it. I talked to plenty of them on the phone.

I also got a DHCP, but it didn't do me any good because it was restricted to talking only to the sas server.

Actually, this is not true. The comcast system works with any operating system that runs a decent dhcp client. For example, under linux, running `dhcpcd <interface>` provices all the authentication you need to connect to the service. Authentication is provided based on the MAC address of your modem, not based on any windows-proprietary method.

What the HELL are you talking about? I've had Comcast cable broadband for going on two years now, and I've never had a PC connected directly to the cable, only an SMC router. What that humble little router box can, Linux can anyday--which amounts to DHCP and nothing more.

I'm a Linux user (clean of windows in my apartment for 4 months now), I use a linksys firewall-hub to connect to them. I had to "bless" the cable connection with windows before I took over the connection with the Linksys and have never looked back.

if you want your call escalated to higher tiers they always ask you waht operating system.. i even had one tier 3 guy ask me for my email address so he could ask me networking questions after i explained to him what NAT was and that I was using OpenBSD (and that the problem was on their end) and after much cajoling i got him to escalate me against his bosses orders to The People Who Actually Know Shit Dept and I got my issues resolved with in 5 minutes of talking to the "Engineer"... companies are totally unwilling to accept that you are not a moron adn their support monkeys are all scripted and know nothing at all.. so basically if your shit doesn't work and you don't have a *supported* platform you're on your own..

I just got a snail mail from Comcast advertising a new service (at least in northern VA)... It is based on "allowing the whole family to be online at the same time" plan. Yes folks, these are the same high speed providers that cry wolf and complain about bandwidth hogs because bandwidth is expensive although they have not said anything to me and I have not noticed anything blocked yet.

A 802.11b wireless CM router all in one unit and 2/256 service for $64.99 with up to 5 machines. I currently pay $49 +$5 CM rental and only get 1.5/128 for one machine, of course my floppy Linux NAT/router handles that. So for basically $10 more a month I could get 25/100% faster speed and a free use of a wireless access point. Actually for me that 256 up would allow me to stream my own mp3's or my security webcam over ssh to work or anywhere I may be, my current 128 is barely to slow. The package does not seem like a bad idea. I could find NOTHING about this on their web site. My only concern is exactly what control will they have over that all in one device?

For those asking about special connecting software.. In my area its plain old DHCP. I brought my CM home, plugged it into my Freesco [freesco.org] floppy based Linux distro on eth0 and it was working within seconds.

As everyone else has said, it is not true that Comcast's cable modem service is incompatible with Linux. I just figured I'd point out where the confusion lies.

Comcast tells people that their service is not compatible with Linux because their browser branding/half-assed customer service software is only for Windows. Because they do not currently have the capability to turn your Linux PC into an animated Comcast advertisement, they claim that no part of their service is compatible with Linux.

One bill? Yeah, right. I have AT&T for my cell phone, local telephone, long distance, cable television, and cable internet. You'd think that they'd at the very least get everything on one bill. (or at the very best, offer a discount to subscribers to multiple services) No such luck.

Once the comcast merger is complete, I'll probably drop them anyway, since they don't provide a newsfeed and have download caps.

MediaOne was my first address.Then, with the AT&T buyout, they changed the mailserver format, so the portion after the @ changed, change #1.Then just 3 months later, they changed forced me to change to an @attbi.com address, change #2.Now, I'll most likely get a @comcast.com or some shit,for change #3.

Check it out, if you don't believe me, or are thinking of crackmoderating me.

How does Comcast's acquisition of their broadband provider affect their DirecTV subscription? Does Comcast send their customer list to DirecTV and tell them they can't show certain programming to these people? That doesn't make sense.